Antonis Alexandris at his final parade on October 28, 2019. [AMNA]
War veteran Antonis Alexandris, a World War II prisoner of war and one of the country’s last remaining veterans, passed away on Thursday at the age of 102 in his homeland of Lesvos.
Alexandris, who was born in 1922 in Skoutaro, a village in Lesvos’s north, was held as a POW at the Pavlos Melas concentration camp in Thessaloniki during the Nazi German occupation of Greece before being transferred to the Krems-Stein and Bernau camps.
Until the recent pandemic, Alexandris led memorial parades along the waterfront of Mytilene, Lesvos’s capital, carrying the banner of the island’s Association of War Victims and Disabled War Veterans.
“There were many of us once…Now, I am alone. We’re all gone,” Alexandris had once told Athens-Macedonian News Agency.
When asked how he achieved such longevity, the war veteran replied: “Death is my companion now. Do you know how many times we’ve met and he passed me by?”
[AMNA]
